Everything That Rises Must Converge | O’Connor’s "Everything That Rises Must Converge"
O’Connor’s use of the YWCA as the destination of Julian’s mother is Petry’s focus in this article, in which the critic shows how ‘‘the Y serves as a gauge of the degeneration of the mother’s Old South family and, concomitantly, of the breakdown of old, church-related values in the United States of the mid-twentieth century.’’
As Patricia Dinneen Maida has pointed out, Flannery O’Connor ‘‘does not flood her work with details; she is highly selective—choosing only those aspects that are most revealing.’’ The justice of this observation in regard to ‘‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’’ was confirmed recently by John Ower, who argues persuasively that Julian’s mother’s having to offer a penny to the little Black boy in lieu of a nickel illustrates the ascendancy of Lincolnesque racial tolerance over Jeffersonian segregation in the South of the Civil Rights Movement. O’Connor’s...
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